Yesterday from empty and sucking air i squeezed 68 litres in. So is the hand book wrong?
Alf,
No, can't understand what's wrong with your tank
.
An original 250/280's tank A113 470 07 01
should hold the nominal 82 litres, perhaps very slightly more when completely empty.
There are several pitfalls however.
First of all, how empty can your tank really be when you fill up. If you do not risk that your engines sputters and stalls because of fuel starvage then your tank certainly is not completely empty ... and even then in that case it could theoretically still hold some remaining liters, 2 - 3 or so.
Second, as the others already mentioned, it is really tricky to fill up the tank completely - the filler neck has been constructed in such a stupid manner
:
albeit looking good and sporty with this archy chrome-capped outside filler neck, the correct filling has always been a hazzle with our SLs and is by no means comparable with the straight filler neck that the (fuel injected) sedans had, which share basically the identical remaining tank geometry as our SLs; those are mostly free of the filling problems we face with our SLs.
The correct filling procedure is absolutely mandatory - as Peter described in detail in his posts.
And finally, is your ventillation system working correctly?
All these little bits sume up when you want to find out how many liters you really can fill up.
Achim
(has also already "received" spilled out fuel over his right bumper half & shoes :'()